Performance

A deft and cunning re-examination of John Boy’s near-death experience at the sawmill. A homespun midnight deconstruction of an entire era of television mannerisms.

“One of the strengths of The Waltons, a video that records a session of TV viewing using a handheld camera, is its ability to convey how our surroundings inform our experience. The video doesn’t stray far from the images on the TV screen, but our attention is divided between the show’s action and the off-camera activity in the apartment.”

Acconci explodes the notion of an artist’s creation, his creative act being the build-up and discharge of saliva, an activity more properly belonging to the realm of necessary and autonomic bodily functions than art. Positioning himself as a hyper self-conscious artistic subject, Acconci fuses the terrains of body art and process art, formulating the body as process, and art as a natural function of the body.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

“A spoof on current art attitudes [that] stretches the definition of what can be considered art. Because the late 1960s and early 1970s were periods of innovation, using the human body as art, making process equivalent to product... [etc.], Baldessari questions that very sense of originality and exploration by taking it to its (rather mundane) limits. By taping a stick at one end, then picking it up at the other, he is both questioning and spoofing what constitutes art.” —Marcia Tucker, “John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable,” John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)

I wander around empty halls of academic buildings carrying bags of Halloween atrocities for our latest class project: a horror movie that lives up to that classification on multiple levels. The viewer is given a front row seat to the directorial process as young and nubile film students submit to attacks by rubber props in a Frankenstein thriller big on chills (caused mainly by the lack of budget) and low on underwear paraphernalia.

Shot with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this colorful drama with song and dance numbers (plus burlesque acts) follows the libidinous poisoning of Vatican personnel by an otherworldly intruder. The cast is mostly young and vibrant and the songs staged as opulently as possible on a $400 budget. Anyone interested in these collaborative productions will find a lot to gawk at in this backstage romance with pagan overtures galore.

An experimental video for electro-feminist-performance-artists Le Tigre, the early eighties MTV aesthetic unpacks a thoroughly current obsession: the hidden erotics of office supplies.

This title is also available on Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks.

Strapped for time due to her busy schedule of personal appearances, Anderson creates a rather clumsy looking clone to take over and keep up her artistic production. Anderson plays both parts, pitting the chain-smoking, productive male half against the laid-back female half. In the end, one highly successful clone begets another clone, a situation spoofing the rise and fall of the '80s art star.

A performance about the artist’s experience in the aftermath of an accident.

Commissioned by and performed at the 2000 Brooklyn Academy Music Next Wave Festival, When Nights Were Dark is a full evening-length collaboration with Joseph Jennings and the Praise Choir. The work was created during a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency which allowed Eiko & Koma the full time use of the studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center North Tower throughout 2000. The décor of The Caravan Project was hugely expanded for this work and placed on a slowly turning wheel.

Using the first color video camera, the artist questions where the devil might be hiding, and then takes a nighttime swim.

In today’s youth-oriented society, the experience and knowledge of older women is typically unheralded and neglected. Countering these ideas is Suzanne Lacy’s Whisper, The Waves, The Wind—a performance evoking and reinforcing the strong spiritual and physical beauty of older women. Lacy says, “They reminded me of the place where the ocean meets shoreline. Their bodies were growing older, wrinkled. But what I saw was the rock in them; solid, with the presence of the years washing over them.” This tape is a document of that performance.

In this episode of the Whispering Pines series, Moulton's character Cynthia is confronted with a distorted mirror image that slips between the grotesque and the exotic, depending on her posture.

Filmed by Jingqiu Guan on November 7, 2022 at Royce Hall Rehearsal Room during the creative residency sponsored by UCLA Center for the Art of Performance (CAP). This video was used for the performance on November 20, 2022 at UCLA.

Performed by Eiko Otake
Edited by Eiko Otake, assisted by Jingqiu Guan

Eiko & Koma titled all of their performances in Europe White Dance (1972-1974). Their presentations were always about one hour, performed without an intermission. In naming their program White Dance, Eiko and Koma were trying to create a new beginning for themselves, not bound to the butoh works of their teachers Hijikata and Ohno, which were often described by the artists themselves as “dances of darkness.”

Revived as part of the Retrospective Project, White Dance is the first piece that Eiko & Koma performed in America.

Why Not A Sparrow is about a girl who enters a fairy tale land where the distinction between human and other animal species is blurred. In this kingdom, survival and extinction are on the tip of every birds’ tongue.

"An Eco-Fable about a girl, a rare bird, who experiences the pleasures and perils of another animal kingdom."

— Big Muddy Film Festival, 2002

In Wigstock ’94, Glennda and her friend Bobra attend Lady Bunny’s Wigstock festival. Following the event’s move from the East to the West Village, they explore the changing dynamics and configurations of queer culture in New York. The pair interview other drag queens, members of the local community, and passersby to get a sense of how an event like Wigstock is received by the city.

An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Bobra. Featuring Jackie Beat, Joan Crawford, Jackie O., Sherry Vine, Nona Vulva, Wendy Wild, and Yumi.

Director Jonathan Reiss and cinematographer/editor Leslie Asako Gladsjo traveled to Europe with Survival Research Laboratories to produce this entertaining and challenging portrait of the innovative group of artist technicians. The tape shows their machines in action and provides insight to their inspirations, political objectives, and budgetary constraints. The tape also reveals SRL’s efforts to confound and confront their foreign audiences with an artform that is, perhaps, uniquely American.

Feminist performance artist, Martha Wilson (b.1947), is director and founder of the alternative New York art space, Franklin Furnace Gallery, in operation since 1976. In this interview, Wilson discusses her Quaker upbringing, the impetus for her move from Nova Scotia to New York, and the founding of Franklin Furnace, as well as her involvement in the feminist punk band collective Disband.

Wind imagines a dying child, a common event until recently and still so in many parts of the world today. This was a collaboration with Chanticleer music director, Joseph Jennings, who arranged a composition by Robert Mirabal and Francisco Guerrero. It was performed live by Chanticleer in San Francisco and specially recorded for tour.  Eiko & Koma’s two sons, Yuta and Shin, both played the role of a boy in the piece. The floor was painted to look like a galaxy and white feathers fell from the ceiling, making a sense of wind visible. 

Women with a Past brings together four 20th Century artists — Yvonne Rainer, Christine Choy, Martha Rosler, and Nancy Spero — in videotaped interviews, shaped and edited by Lyn Blumenthal to examine the art of documentary. In a skillfully woven series of scenes in which the interviewer’s voice is not heard, the interviewees appear to be talking directly, intimately to the viewer. Blumenthal used short segments of each woman’s work to demonstrate how her philosophical and political stances are articulated. 

Ming Wong creates videos that explore performance and issues of race and gender. Born in Singapore of Chinese heritage, and now based in Berlin, his work examines cross-cultural experiences by appropriating scenes of iconic world cinema. Wong casts himself anachronistically as the star, critically exposing the otherness of the relationship of media and world history.

Swamp Swamp and Wurmburth are each comprised of a series of tightly cropped shots of small, hand-made table-top sculptures or "sets".  Paint and many other materials that behave like paint (i.e. lotion, shampoo, foodstuffs) are blown through these environments with plastic tubing and forced air.  Each edited collection of shots makes an endless cycle of primal sludge and rupturing goo.

Presenting a series of flashcards to the camera, Baldessari continues his exploration of visual semantics, defining the intersection of language and image. In this instance, each flashcard bears a picture that represents a letter of the alphabet. Like Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, a secondary theme of Xylophone is a critique of learning as memorization, with the length of the tape producing—not surprisingly—an effect of boredom rather than insight.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.